An eye of the unseen

Evening

How tranquilly the evening’s darkening,
dusk deepening beneath the trees.
Consult the long alleyways of the skies
for the gift of this evening
and the cause of your ease.

But the waste! the pain and stress –
those reachings into secrets of the dark –
quarrying endlessness,
plummeting bottomlessness,
quizzing every question mark.

Why this rummaging into whence and why?
Empty let’s be. Open and free.
Let secrets come, or let them fly
away, diffuse like cloudscapes
or whisperings through a tree.

Eyes must glow as your spirits peer
through a wakeful cranny in where you are.
Only the silent have ears to hear.
When the doorstep feels the touch of a toe
only the vigilant’s door is ajar.

Huojuvat keulat (’Swaying prows’, 1945)

Moonlight in the forest

Under the sleeping branches light
glimmers weirdly in the night,

through the wood the cryptic road
comes from nowhere, nowhere goes.

My shadow’s fled. And soon
my body’s gone. Dissolved in moon.

My footfall hovers ownerless.
Fingers touch on emptiness.

Jääpeili (‘Ice mirror’, 1928)

A rustling

The odour of all the leaves bursting –
that’s all I know now
in this rustle and flow
of rain. Doors are opening

into the greater art and key:
as things are, just let them be,
chancy, clear,
as the wind is here.

Just now I’m whole, just now
I’m one with every bursting bough.
Summer scenting my mouth and me,
I’m a glint of rain on a tree –

exhaling into the leaves,
and smiling at the huge verve
of a daybreak on the skyline’s curve.
I neither deny nor believe.

Humming

A sunbeam glistened,
flickered for a flash
on the side of a comber,
stroked the rockside,
vanished between leaves.
In passing we
swapped a word or so.
We’d, just a little,
understood
the other.
We were working together.
Rejoicing at it, I hummed,
hummed, just so.
Don’t know,
did that light,
the slightest of lights,
also know
that I was.
That we were.

Paradiso

I’m silent as death.
Not a move not a word.
But what’s this I heard?
A wind’s breath –

deep in my being
where no being’s available
The utterly unsayable
is ready for saying ­

openly now
with no fierce
pain. Yes, my wall’s pierced
through and through –

for gladly somewhere
– as no one’s speaking –
a song’s breathing
in dreamers everywhere